BASEBALL; Baseball Gets Serious in a New South Africa

Paul Bell knows that where he is today 19 years old, starting at shortstop for South Africa in the Olympics and playing professional baseball in Montana, nearly 10,000 miles from home -- has as much to do with timing as talent.

Had Bell been born two or three decades earlier, his dream would have been unthinkable for a South African, let alone for someone who, like Bell, is not white. Baseball has never approached the popularity here of rugby, cricket or soccer. That it is played here at all comes as a surprise to many South Africans.

But like every sport and every element of life in South Africa, baseball's evolution was shaped by race, from who was permitted to play on amateur teams to the international isolation that kept talented South Africans from playing abroad. Now, several years into the new South Africa, the once-segregated sport is adapting to new realities and seizing new chances.

For the first time, South African baseball is attracting serious attention from major league scouts in search of prospects like Bell and his national squad teammate Wesley Botha, an 18-year-old white pitcher from Johannesburg, who signed a minor league contract with the Atlanta Braves this year.

Around the country, thousands of South African children who had never picked up a baseball bat or glove have begun playing the sport as part of an initiative by Major League Baseball that has brought baseball into hundreds of schools over the last three years.

In September, Botha, Bell and the rest of the national baseball team will compete in the Sydney Olympics after becoming the first South African baseball squad to qualify for the Summer Games.

Bell is already trying to prove that he belongs in professional ball. Flown over by the Yankees in February for a tryout, Bell, who is colored, as mixed-race people are known here, did not catch on with the shortstop-stocked Yankees. But he auditioned with several other teams, including the Milwaukee Brewers, who signed him to a minor league contract. Bell participated in the Brewers' extended spring training in Phoenix, and then he was sent to Helena, Mont., where the Brewers' rookie league team began play two weeks ago.

He knows that if Helena is to be only a first stop in his American baseball career, he will have to take his game higher than he ever did back home. ''It's much more a part of the culture here,'' Bell said by telephone. ''No matter how good you are, you have to work at it, and that's what I'm striving to do.''

For his father, Michael, once a promising player himself, for whom the end of white minority rule and its repressive segregation came too late, the joy of his son's success is almost indescribable. ''It greatly pleases me,'' he said, chuckling at his own understatement, during an interview in the study of his home here in Cape Town, surrounded by team photographs, game balls and other mementos of his days playing for the Varsity Old Boys Club. ''I don't know what words to use.''

A Game's Quiet Beginnings

Bell and Botha are neither the first nor the only South Africans to traverse the Atlantic looking to make a name on the baseball diamond. The slugger Nick Dempsey spent a couple of seasons in the Dodgers organization before returning to South Africa two years ago, and pitcher Tim Harrell is in his second year with the Dodgers, playing this season for the club's Class A team in Vero Beach, Fla.

But Bell and Botha are arguably the most promising prospects so far, and their emergence could not have come at a better time. Major League Baseball is a decade into an effort to make the sport truly international, and a few years ago, the league trained its sights on South Africa, where sports were emerging from the enforced isolation of the apartheid era.

South Africa could claim a long, if limited, tradition of playing baseball, dating to 1898 when a group of American gold miners started a team near Johannesburg. More than a century later, the game is still not widely played here, but where it is, the leagues are well organized and the players enthusiastic.

''We want the game to be everywhere,'' Paul Archey, Major League Baseball's vice president for international business operations, said in a telephone interview. ''Africa being one part of the world where it's not widely played, South Africa was a natural place for us to go to develop the game.''

Nearly 100 amateur clubs are active in the country, some fielding two or three teams, others six or seven. The clubs, which are strongest in and around Cape Town, include about 30,000 players.

The modest total and the predominance of whites among the sport's oldest and best players underscore how limited baseball's reach has been. On the club teams, especially the adult ones, white players still fill out most of the lineups. Colored players are represented, especially here in the Western Cape Province, where they make up most of the all-star team. Blacks remain almost invisible at the top levels of amateur baseball in South Africa, with none on the roster of the national team.

Major League Baseball has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide elementary schools here with bats, balls and, most important, instruction for physical education teachers, who must typically learn the game from scratch themselves. Baseball began its international development program in Australia in 1993 and then expanded to Britain, Germany and now South Africa. Mexico and Italy are next. By the end of this year, about 200,000 South African children, most of them black, will have been reached.

A Long-Term Investment

Baseball in South Africa is still a long way from where its backers here and abroad hope someday to see it. ''I think it's only going to get better,'' said Allard Baird, the Kansas City Royals' new general manager.

Baird spent 10 days in South Africa in April assessing the quality of play. He came away pleasantly surprised and hired a part-time scout here. ''We understand that it's going to take time,'' he said. ''This is not going to be an immediate return on our investment, but we want to make sure we're there.''

Until now, baseball has been what people here call a Cinderella sport, barely acknowledged by the news media or noticed by the public. Only the schools, which reach into every distant corner of this sports-mad nation of more than 40 million people, have the capacity to change that. Already baseball is taught in 800 schools.

''The biggest problem why it didn't take off in the early years was because it was not a school sport,'' said Raymond Tew, the head coach of the national team.

Like so many South Africans who gravitated to baseball, Tew, 50, started out playing cricket in school. But a chance childhood encounter with a band of baseball-playing missionaries hooked him on hardball.

''I was good at cricket, but cricket was boring,'' he said as he took in a recent tournament in the coastal city of Durban. ''Baseball was so much quicker.''

Despite growing up in the 1950's and 1960's, before television arrived in South Africa, Tew saw more American baseball than anyone could have imagined. Coca-Cola, which sponsored his club team, arranged for baseball films to be sent from the United States every few months, featuring everything from the World Series and All-Star Games to pitching and hitting tutorials.

Often the films were a year or two old, but to Tew and his teammates, gathered around the projector on a Friday night, they might have well been live. ''We never had TV and you never heard it on the radio, so whatever game we saw, it was like it just happened,'' he said. ''I got to know all the stars, Whitey Ford, Roy Campanella. They're the names I grew up with.''

From Television to the Field

Satellite television's recent arrival, with ESPN among its offerings, has afforded baseball a chance to showcase itself to some of the youngsters it hopes to woo. Even broadcast television is joining in, with the e.tv network premiering a weekly program this season called Baseball Max, which features tips from the pros and highlights from the previous week's major league games.

And in a country where soccer jerseys and rugby shirts are the sports-fashion rage, baseball fans show off their allegiances, too. At the tournament in Durban, a couple of fans wore Yankee caps, one spectator sported a Mariners jacket and another a White Sox T-shirt.

For the 150 or so fans taking in the games at what was the last big tournament of the season, it was just a day at the ballpark. With its cinder-block seats, pockmarked backstops and scruffy infields, Mishi Jones Baseball Park is not Camden Yards. But there were burgers, franks and beer to buy, balls and strikes to call and hits and runs to cheer.

Major League Baseball, of course, would like to see much bigger crowds, people clamoring to see more American baseball on television and more of its merchandise in stores. But baseball executives, as they chart out the sport's international expansion, have concluded that success will start with getting people to play the game.

''If we want to have a business, we have to have a sport,'' Archey said. ''You can only do so much on entertainment on TV. You really need to get kids playing the game.''

So might South Africa some day have a hometown hero to root for in the major leagues, like Hideo Nomo, the Japanese pitcher now playing for the Detroit Tigers, or Graeme Lloyd, the pitcher from Australia playing for the Montreal Expos?

Maybe that star will be Bell or Botha, or maybe someone a few years their junior. As Bell played out the first chapter of his dream on a field in Phoenix, he liked to think it would be him. He expected to be overwhelmed, but he held his own, he said. His father was not surprised.

''I played sports all my life, so it was only natural for the kids to play, but Paul had that natural talent,'' Michael Bell said. ''He had the killer instinct.''

Now 50, Michael Bell was one of the first players to cross over from Cape Town's colored baseball leagues, where he had played for more than 20 years, to join the area's top white league. That was 1978, and it would be more than a decade before the leagues would officially unify.

But Michael Bell and a few other colored players who joined the Varsity Old Boys helped set the stage for the day this September in Sydney when his son will take the field under the flag of South Africa, a country that not long ago would have denied the father the same opportunity.

Michael Bell sits at home, showing off the Brewers cap his son sent him, along with a Yankees cap and jacket. He thinks about his son and, in his mind at least, plays along with him. Half a world away, the younger Bell thinks about the days when his father watched his every play and knows that Dad is watching now, too.

''I know when I'm playing, he's playing with me,'' Paul Bell said. ''It makes me feel I'm giving him a part of his life he never had.''